Comment by ozy
9 hours ago
I really like the idea of openscad, or this, or the many alternatives. But when I say a shape with these and these dimensions, the next shape should attach to it somewhere. And then I want to say: chamfer all outside edges. But in all these programs, it's me redoing the math in my code, computing where the shape goes. As for chamfers, I just give up ...
> chamfer all outside edges
FreeCAD can do this. So can all of the proprietary parametric CAD programs I've ever used, some of which (PTC OnShape, Siemens Solid Edge, Autodesk Fusion) have usable free tiers available.
If you are a programmer OpenSCAD is easier to learn. However you will quickly run into limits. Just a few hours of a FreeCAD tutorial and I was already seeing how I could do things I'd never attempt in OpenSCAD. FreeCAD has a reputation of not being great, but I'm not far enough into it to learn the limits - things I can't figure out feel like things I could learn, in OpenSCAD the things I couldn't figure out where because they were too complex - I could but the code wouldn't be readable so there was no point (not to mention math errors).
FreeCAD is designed for the things real designers really do. OpenSCAD is designed for the things mathematicians do.
BOSL2 is a great library to use with Openscad. It provides a bunch of primitives shapes functions with chamfer/rounding parameters.
Math doesn't go away tho
Build123d can do chamfers. You can also do relative positioning by selecting positions from the first shape. (there's various ways to do that)